IOTA: A New Partner on the Block(chain)

April 17, 2019

Celebrating a year of milestones

It has been a year since the launch of our Blockchain Integration Hub. A year full of milestones leading to real world deployments of products combining EVRYTHNG Active Digital IdentitiesTM and a mix of different blockchains. For instance, Almond launched FACT, a new drink brand digitized on the EVRYTHNG platform. Every FACT can tell the product’s unique story—where, when and how its ingredients were farmed, where and when it was packaged and its journey to store.

The EVRYTHNG Blockchain integration Hub helps brands simply and cost-effectively assess which blockchain solutions and capabilities are most appropriate for their business and then rapidly deploy. Consumer product brands can now experiment with the unique features of individual blockchains without the risk. By removing the risk, we allow brands to focus on the business benefits rather than the complexity of the technology. A win-win for the brand and the consumer.

Over the past year, we have created powerful integrations with some of the most recognized blockchains in the world including, OriginTrail, Tierion, BLOCKv, Bitcoin and Ethereum. This is why we are so excited to announce a strategic partnership with IOTA, a quite different kind of public distributed ledger technology (DLT), with a toolset and ecosystem targeted at IoT and supply chain use cases.

What’s so special about IOTA?

IOTA brings a whole new dimension to the EVRYTHNG Blockchain Integration Hub. As with other EVRYTHNG hub connectors, the IOTA integration allows consumer product brands to experiment with emerging DLT capabilities while relying on the scalability, interoperability and maturity of the EVRYTHNG platform. With IOTA’s unique distributed ledger technology, people and machines can transfer data or value without any transaction fees in a trustless, permissionless and decentralized environment. This last point is game changing for IoT and supply chain use cases. Currently, the fees charged by other public blockchains like, Ethereum and Bitcoin, put the technology out of reach for many brands.

IOTA is a big player in the emerging world of public blockchains with a consistent ranking among the largest blockchains in market capitalization. Interestingly, IOTA is also recognized as a blockchain without the blocks or the chain!

Instead of using a blockchain-based distributed ledger at its core, it uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This is why IOTA is a distributed ledger technology rather than a blockchain. This is important because it provides consumer product brands with more options, including:

Faster transactions

Less energy consumption

Adaptability for use with resource-limited devices

Looking to the future, IOTA transactions actually carry value (MIOTA tokens) to facilitate secure communication across the IoT and provide autonomous compensation: imagine for instance a container tracking sensor being rewarded by a client application for providing temperature and location information about the shipment it tracks, or supply chain information systems being rewarded with crypto tokens for sharing data to authorized parties.

Tell me more. Why should I care?

Because IOTA is a general purpose DLT, the integration can be used for a wide variety of use cases in both IoT and supply chain contexts. This is critical for the target markets we serve—specifically, the consumer products and apparel industry. Following are just a few of the many reasons we are excited to partner with IOTA:

IOTA’s MAM protocol. This system allows consumer product brands to elegantly link transactions together to retrieve each individual product’s entire lifecycle in a single transaction. This capability is particularly useful in delivering IoT and supply chain applications such as:

Authenticity – consumer products can be traced through the supply chain from sourcing to manufacturer to retailer to consumer—proving authenticity of products; reducing risk of counterfeiting; and creating trust among consumers

Traceability & Provenance – drives business value for brands through end-to-end supply-chain traceability; greater supply chain visibility also benefits consumers in the form of safer and more transparent products as well as higher quality

IOTA has also been designed to accept data from sensors. As a result, IOTA’s DLT can be used in combination with the EVRYTHNG platform to deliver auditable sensor data. This is important for applications like the active tracking of pallets or containers in the supply chain.

Availability

What’s next?

Beyond the technical integration between IOTA’s DLT and the EVRYTHNG Blockchain Integration Hub, we are also working with the IOTA Foundation to deliver projects that utilize both companies’ platforms including two commercial projects we’ll be announcing soon. Stay tuned.

If you’re interested in piloting blockchain integrations to make your products smarter, please contact us today!

Summary:

EVRYTHNG now offers an integration with IOTA, one of the world’s leading public blockchains

As with our other EVRYTHNG Blockchain Integration Hub connectors, the IOTA integration allows consumer product brands to experiment with the emerging capabilities of blockchains while relying on the scalability, interoperability and maturity of the EVRYTHNG platform

The IOTA integration is especially useful for IoT and supply chain use cases such as transparency and provenance for consumers and real-time data sharing between supply chain partners